Hey, folks:

If a Flash piece needs to be localizable (translatable), it's reasonable to assume it'll need to pull its text content from a data source (database, XML document, etc).

Without embedding half a gig of fonts into the Flash file, how can Russian, Polish, Greek, etc. characters be pulled up and used (like an external font file)?

Any ideas? Am I making any sense?

~d00d

It has been a long time since I did flash but I think you could load in a .swf for each language containing the appropriate font in the library.

In each language swf the font's linkage ID is the same.

The parent swf then has all textfields set to use that font via the linkage ID

I have found that with careful selection you can get a good balance by careful selection 'Cyrillic' plus 'extended latin I' ( and a few others ) and limiting fonts to about 2. That way you normally can get by with one swf occasional extra ones for oriental countries, but normally end up having to adjust textfields anyway as its they are so different. In terms of the content usually xml file with flashvar in the html specifying which xml file to use. Normally translate a few lines into German in critical places to check it fits, as normally translation gets done nearly at the end. Normally they say multilingual but really when you get the project manager to talk with client they mean only a few and often not oriental, so get them to clarify. Normally they have choosen a special company font that does not support all special characters so you have to do some split joins to replace some characters with arial html font before rendering the font or they drop the offending language till the next phase. I don't think I have had good cause to use shared fonts recently if you do you will probably be back here asking more questions and pulling your hair out.